Dead For My Friend

By Omar Ayar

Faking money is the easiest way of making it. A perfect counterfeiting machine for any currency is sought after by the underworld. A private detective hired to find it, travels to the tribal areas between Pakistan and Afghanistan to follow a clue, only to witness his informer executed. International mafias and clandestine networks collide in a complex investigation criss-crossing multiple cultures and cities. The money is an illusion but the human manipulation is deadly real.

Corpses multiply faster than the leads, with showdowns and chases in Singapore, Hong Kong, Tallinn, London, and Vienna. The detective refuses to give up, despite the mounting toll, relying on friends and strangers to solve the case.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Omar Ayar
• Release date: Mar 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301349333

Omar Ayar

I was born to be a dead-end sign at the crossroads for trouble. I could always see it coming from a distance, not knowing which way it would go, dust vortices of the devil, howling women, men braying for blood with their steely machines, children laughing at a madman. I would let the trouble get real close, before I ran. That's how I played the game, and I'm still around to tell the tales.

Book preview

Dead For My Friend

By Omar Ayar

Copyright 2013 Omar Ayar

Smashwords Edition

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This is a work of pure fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter one: King’s machine

Chapter two: Sterile Singapore

Chapter three: Night out in Kowloon

Chapter four: Come September

Chapter five: Trouble in Tallinn

Chapter six: Gimlet

Chapter seven: Illusion

Chapter eight: Blowing in the wind

Chapter nine: A little night music

Chapter ten: Endgame

Chapter one: King’s machine

Fear is an acquired taste. You’re born with only two: falling over and loud noise or the impact of a large amount of external energy, sound being one form, if you want to be technical about it. The rest are given to you. Doses throughout your life, administered by your parents, your siblings, friends, enemies, bullies, priests, strangers, the sentinels of the state, others of your kind. Hammered into you, nails in your coffin, long before you’re lowered six feet under, and the earth shovelled over you. The fear of the dark, of being left alone, eventually of dying alone, of making love alone, of poverty, of not getting an erection, of losing your erection too early, never having an orgasm, of being ugly, puny, stupid, not having the latest toys, the prettiest dresses, not being as good as the kids in your class, not being good enough for the girl or boy you like, scoring too low in a school test, losing a game, being shown up by your neighbour, being late, the boogieman, the alien terrorist, of being incarcerated, humiliated, losing your child, your promotion, of robbery, being raped, swindled, of being a nobody, a mediocrity, being too short or too tall, too fat or skinny, the shape of your nose, of things you never imagined existed, things you would never guess meant anything, and of yourself. And it doesn’t stop at that. The world wants you to be afraid, even after you’re dead. Of burning in eternity, for not being afraid enough when you were alive.

I had put all my fears in a box, having been given more than my share, and gift wrapped it for myself. For a rainy day, when I no longer wanted to be me but the product of others. I would open the box now and then, and stare inside, to make sure I knew who I was by contrast. Sometimes when a new fear would come along, I would mix it with its cousins, think of having a raffle. Sometimes I would think of mailing the box to myself. Most of the time, I didn’t give a damn about the box or its contents. Totally forget about it, whether it was in the basement, the attic, or under my pillow. Maybe the collection would escape from the box and strangle me in my sleep one day.

Crouching behind bushes, of the Devil’s dung specie, I was watching these men from a safe distance, the different types of fears being played out. An execution on the narrow riverbank, a sloping lump of mud and dirt spewed out by the water over the ages. The executioners were facing the river, guns aimed down the incline at their target. When you’re shot, you don’t jump a foot back with your arms flung wide to display your acrobatic talent before it’s too late, topple over with a graceful bow in a theatrical show, clutch the bullet hole poignantly, crumple on your knees in prayer, you just do what you’ve been doing all along: trying to get by for as long as you can with the dealt cards, in this case a high velocity metal projectile spinning ruthlessly into your body. There’s the shock of the sound, a hideous screaming sonic wave at a body jolting frequency you’ve never experienced, with a corollary you’ve been taught through television and movies that the end has arrived, and you may have been on the other side of the longitudinal wave to know what the damage will look like. Then there’s the impact, and nothing has taught you how to deal with your skin being viciously punctured, organs sploshed, bones smashed, exquisitely evolved nerves ruthlessly severed, your body gone for good. And once that’s done, you deal with the final moments like you did with the longer haul before that. The physical infirmities, your diverse shortcomings, that you weren’t good enough for the situation, the fait accompli of being outsmarted, of being on the wrong side of the equation, the labour of breathing, the coordination of movement, the calculation of what do next, not needing your bank account any longer, who’s going to miss you, who’s going to tap dance on your grave, facing the fears you’ve collected, the realization that you were all alone all along, and a little joy interspersed in the devilish mix that you won’t have to worry about this shit no more. They shot him at a distance of about ten yards. Rarely do you die from the first bullet. It takes a few at the minimum, depending on the calibre, distance, material of the bullet, and the point of impact, among other factors in such complicated exchanges of energy between an inert projectile and a living organism. Evolution hasn’t been that sloppy. It hasn’t made it too easy to die.

The execution was a simple affair. With the firepower you can get now, you don’t need a row of marksmen, a couple of senseless trigger pullers will do. Anyone can blast you full of cheap lead from a low-cost machine gun at that range, no skill involved, only a decision to kill sent to the fingertip. A decision that humans can justify to themselves in countless ways. There were two shooters: short, skinny men, standing on either side of their beret wearing conductor, a bulky man towering over them. The three of them were dressed in t-shirts and trousers, rather than the typical local attire of long shirts and loose pajama like pants. The target was a tall, lanky man, bareheaded and blindfolded, stripped down to a white sleeveless, low neck vest and a long cloth wrapped around his waist. The target was shaking his bald head from side to side. The killing conductor raised his arm high to the sky and swung it down. The shooters played their instruments. Bullets kicked up dirt, splashed in the river. The target shook with the bullets, then staggered forward. It wasn’t an angry charge or desperate attempt to escape. He knew his time was up. He went down on his knees. The loss of blood and oxygen can do that, after the initial shock waves. I thought they had tied his hands in front of him, but the knot must have been loose. His arms thrashed the air. He covered the few yards on his knees, missing a rose between the teeth for his killers. He grabbed and hugged a leg of the conductor. The conductor jerked a bit but stood still. He must have been frozen by the solemnity of the occasion, out of practice for the ritual. It was too dark to see their expressions. I could only make out the silhouettes in the moonlight. There was no threat from the shot man. He needed to hold someone, anyone, feel the warmth of another human, he didn’t want to die alone, fears had made him, ruled him, dictated the course of his life, and here he was being shot to death in the darkness, his life ending by the foul river with all the fears he had ever known. He died embracing the leg of his appointed murderer, slumping to the dirt as the bulky man shook him off his leg. I watched the spectacle but didn’t interfere. My corpse wasn’t Kalashnikov proof.

He had been my informer. I had met him many moons ago, back down the winding staircase of time, in a clay fortress not too far away from where he was killed. The fortress, a sprawling compound in the tribal areas of the Durand line between Pakistan and Afghanistan, belonged to Badshah Khan a drug lord with a major share of the narcotics exports from the region. He was a bodyguard of Badshah Khan. A shaved dome head, bushy eyebrows, and a thick, twirled moustache suited his role. He chatted with me in the veranda, while I waited for his employer to finish lunch with a group of US and Pakistani senators. He was curious about the rest of the world, peppering me with questions. I was only curious about the fifty mile radius around us, needing to find someone in that circle that afternoon, somewhere in the dust, clay huts, rocks, ravines, defiles, and grottos of the rugged territory baking in the frontier sun. Shadows lengthened under the arches in the veranda. The politicians were costing me precious time. I had gone there for assistance in negotiating the release of a kidnapping victim. When you’re in the business of saving lives, the scorekeeping isn’t simple. You think each life you save will make up for all the ones that you lost. You’re not only saving the victim, you’re saving yourself. The imperfections of your existence don’t matter. It’s only when it’s over that you realise you’re back to where you were. There’s no climactic salvation, atonement, glory, triumph, it hasn’t changed a thing, the same road appears once again ahead of you. Badshah Khan, his first name meaning king in the vernacular, came out of the luncheon before I had detached my shaking leg and clubbed his bodyguard with it. He was dressed in plain native clothing similar to that of his bodyguard, shirtsleeves rolled up, a shiny difference being the platinum Rolex on his wrist. I didn’t like the sight of the watch, any reminder of the passing time. I talked hurriedly. I was known as a madman back then in those parts. Unpredictable, no one knew what I would do. No one could say they knew me well, much about me. Except that I liked hunting outlaws. All-nighters of cops raiding places, an armed pack of vampires on the loose. Scarily enough I couldn’t predict myself either. I didn’t know what I was going to do if the drug lord didn’t come through. It’s not the gun or the sword that makes you tough but the raging heart, the mad pump of your blood. The drug lord could see the crazy vortices it was pumping in the veins of my eyes. He asked me to wait for another ten minutes, that’s all, and left with his bodyguard to make a phone call. He returned in five, said his bodyguard was escorting me to the place I would find my friend, the kidnapee. I didn’t know the kidnapee personally. He was just another victim for me, a Welsh medic working for the Red Cross, that I knew from the police file and the emotions of those who wanted him back. We drove off in my Suzuki jeep to the shopping high street of a nearby village: a row of clay huts with aluminium shutters, without any frills such as glass windows, not exactly the brand names of the other half of the world, and a café with large black slabs of hashish hanging from the open shop-front. All the shops were closed and deserted except the hashish café. We stopped at the hashish café where an old man, wearing a white turban that doubled his diminutive size, was waiting for us. The bodyguard bought enough hashish for a village bonfire, while the old man pinpointed an abandoned shop at the end of the street. We recovered the victim from the shop basement, naked and blindfolded, sweating and trembling. The medic’s pale, flabby skin was splotched with red rashes, his hair thinner and whiter than in the photographs I’d seen. We bought clothes from the hashish seller to dress him up. The medic broke down sobbing on our ride out of there. The bodyguard held him gently in the jeep’s backseat, talking to him in Pushto, saying he was going to be alright, the ordeal was over. The medic fell asleep with his head on the bodyguard’s shoulder.

The bodyguard told me he didn’t plan to be working for the drug lord for too long. He got that wrong. He told me how I could find him, if I ever needed to. It turned out I did.

I had phoned him, seven days before his execution, as soon as I arrived in Peshawar. The city, built in the recess of the valley, was deprived of trees and greenery except for a few scattered patches. It had bone chilling winters and stinking hot, muggy summers. The architecture was amorphous, the roads congested with traffic. The air was clogged by the pervasive exhaust fumes of vehicles running on adulterated fuel. The city wasn’t exactly known for cultural extravaganza. You wouldn’t find an array of festivals, gigs, theatre, anything of the sort. Indeed the only public entertainment I knew of, apart from the food and hashish, were the downtown cinemas showing homemade porn under the cover of soapy movies. It didn’t take long to realize that the city had plunged to a new low of grimness. Barricades and police checking all over the place, blocked roads, barbed wire, nervous cops, spooked civilians, an invisible cloud of doom and gloom that might suddenly rain rockets. I had my own ghosts in the city, like everywhere I’d lived and died a bit, but that’s not why I was there.

War is a commercial business. It always has been, always will be. The Soviet invasion of ’79 spawned multiple layers of business innovation. Not all on its own, but it did provide the main impetus. The tribal areas belt on the Pak-Afghan border was already well on its way to becoming an industrial zone of heroin production, thanks to the folly of phasing out government regulated opium production and consumption quotas for registered users in Pakistan. Heroin superseded opium as a value-added product with sales to private buyers instead of the government, the most profitable being to foreign markets. And as a business analyst would put it, heroin generated far superior returns per unit raw material with almost perfect customer retention. Opium was out, heroin was in. It became a convenient source for funding guerillas against the Soviets. A complementary business was weapons trading. A massive influx of US weapons for Afghanistan spilled over into Pakistan: all sorts of guns, grenades, and rockets being sold to the street criminal, the mafias, the macho, and even the elite. The ownership of the latest assault rifle or grenade launcher became a social status symbol in the country.

The tribal areas had long served the purpose of a well-known smuggling scam run by the government authorities and the tribal chiefs they patronised. Afghanistan, being a landlocked country, relied on Pakistan’s port city of Karachi for its imports. All goods booked for Afghanistan were exempt from the high import duties levied by Pakistan. These goods went to Afghanistan only to be smuggled back through the tribal areas into Pakistan, and marketed at a major discount to legally imported goods. After the Soviet invasion, the same system applied to the goods sent by the US and other countries for Afghanistan, including the truckloads of weapons and US dollars. A significant portion of the US taxpayer cash was skimmed by the managers of the whole show, a management cost or transaction fee if you will. These new, more organised managers of the Afghan war business took the resident bureaucrats and tribal cronies under their wing. Some of the managers decided to diversify their customers and sell the weapons elsewhere. To sum it up, the Afghan fight against the Soviets became a hotbed of war commerce, with the Pak-Afghan border nexus turned into a robust market for the merchants of death and destruction. Violence packaged into tradable financial products for the military industry complex. The old smuggling game had been turned into a multi-billion dollar industry with global cross-currents and tentacles.

An unpleasant consequence, overlooked in the heat of the money raking, was that the pseudo-religious guerrilla organizations seed funded to fight the Soviets became self-sustaining and delusional about ruling the region if not the